Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson, known professionally as Waldo Emerson, was an American essayist, lecturer, and poet who led the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. He was seen as a champion of individualism and a prescient critic of the countervailing pressures of society, and he disseminated his thoughts through dozens of published essays and more than 1,500 public lectures across the United States...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth25 May 1803
CountryUnited States of America
There is a tendency for things to right themselves.
People that seem so glorious are all show; underneath they are like everyone else.
Why need I volumes, if one word suffice?
There is more difference in the quality of our pleasures than in the amount.
Mysticism is the mistake of an accidental and individual symbol for an universal one.
We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.
The wave of evil washes all our institutions alike.
Let the words be gazetted and ridiculous henceforward.
Democracy becomes a government of bullies tempered by editors.
Everything teaches transition, transference, metamorphosis: therein is human power, in transference, not in creation; & therein is human destiny, not in longevity but in removal. We dive & reappear in new places.
People do not deserve good writing, they are so pleased with bad.
The student is to read history actively not passively.
Things are in the saddle. And ride mankind.
I unsettle all things.